The benefits of recycling
Environmental benefits
The recycling industry is making a substantial contribution to the improvement of our environment by cutting greenhouse gas emissions, delivering significant energy and water savings, as well as conserving non-renewable virgin resources.
Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) modellingTPTPTP[1]PTPTPT has shown that by substituting secondary-use materials for virgin materials in 2007-08 the environmental benefits from reprocessing all material recovered would be equivalent to:
- Victoria saving more than 82 million gigajoules of energy
- preventing more than 4 million tonnes of greenhouse gases being emitted into the atmosphere (equivalent to taking 676,000 cars off the road)
- saving 47,000 megalitres of water (enough to fill almost 19,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools).
Economic benefits
Victoria's reprocessing industries contributed more than $85 million to the state's economy during 2007-08 through capital investment and expenditure on research and development (R&D).
Level of capital investment and expenditure on R&D by Victoria's reprocessing industries, Victoria 2007-08
[1] RMIT University, Centre for Design, Life Cycle Impact Data for Resource Recovery from C&I and C&D Waste in Victoria, September 2005
Top | Last updated 27/08/2009
Annual Survey of Recycling Industries
